What It Was Like to Be an Abortion Provider in the U.S. Before Roe v. Wade

0

What It Was Like to Be an Abortion Provider in the U.S. Before Roe v. Wade
Michael Stone
Jul 27, 2017

Dr. David Grimes performed his first abortion in 1972 as a medical student at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. Five years before, North Carolina had joined Colorado and California in becoming the first states to legalize abortions in a few select scenarios: rape, incest, physical or mental defects in the child, and threats to the health or life of the mother.

The Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade made abortion legal, upon the mother’s request, across the nation. The decision came shortly before Grimes graduated from medical school, and he would go on to perform the procedure many times in his 42-year OB-GYN career. Now retired, he is an author of Every Third Woman in America: How Legal Abortion Transformed Our Nation.